By Paul Dinger
“The American flag is a symbol of the Constitution and American history.”
– President Woodrow Wilson, a century ago
“… the flag of the Crusader cross …”
– Osama bin Laden, after seeing the nationwide display of flags in the aftermath of the 2001 attack he engineered
“If some circumstances imposed the Nazi flag on us and we continued to live on in 50 years or however long it took, it [the swastika] would stand for all the great things the stars and stripes do.”
– Whitney Smith, the Massachusetts founder of Vexillology (the study of flags), said this a month after the 2001 terrorist attack
“I don’t know why whenever liberals see the American flag, they see the Nazi swastika.”
– Boston Herald columnist Don Feder
“The explicit message of the Stars and Stripes is simply that America is a country that had 13, and currently has 50 states. Beyond that Americans and others can read into the flag any meaning they want.”
– Harvard history professor Samuel Huntington, in his celebrated 2004 book “Who Are We?: The challenges to America’s identity”
As illustrated by the above comments, people project onto the American flag ideas that tell more about their worldview than they do about the Founding Fathers’ intended meaning of the flag. This is the big news and the bizarre fact about American’s primary symbol a few days after its 240th birthday: The American flag has become a Rorschach test.
Looking at the above quotes, we see the top international expert on flags, the man who founded the study of flags, “Vexillology,” Whitney Smith, declaring that America’s flag is meaningless. And then, the last quote, by the most respected expert on American identity, Samuel Huntington, agreeing with Smith, gives us a clear diagnosis of the state of the American mind in the early 21st century. America is suffering from an advanced case of amnesia.
To Marxists, Muslims, atheists, liberals and the Democratic Confederacy during the Civil War, the Stars and Stripes symbolize the Evil Empire. To the multitude of American soldiers who risked their lives to preserve it, the red-white-and-blue signifies God’s country, the “city on a hill” and “the last best hope of earth.” American liberals and the many tentacles of the mass media find America’s banner an embarrassing relic of American sins. To them the flag is the emblem of slavery, Native American genocide, arrogant imperialism and beer-belly patriotism.
A century ago, on the 140th anniversary of the Stars and Stripes, President Woodrow Wilson announced that the flag was a symbol of the Constitution and American history. Really? The flag was unveiled on June 14, 1777. The Constitutional Convention was a decade in the future.
How could the flag stand for something that didn’t exist? How could the flag be a symbol of American history when the founders had no idea of what the future looked like – or even whether there would be an American history? Wilson’s statement is a classic example of the Rorschach test interpretation of America’s primary symbol.
So, let’s pause on this, the 240th birthday of the Stars and Stripes and the 241st birthday of our nation, and face the startling fact about the banner of History’s Great Nation. Few know what Old Glory means. You may be thinking: “What are you talking about?! It means ‘freedom!'”
Freedom: ‘Just another word for nothing left to lose’?
There’s that big problem with the word “freedom,” as Lincoln pointed out during the Civil War. Are you aware of the long train of interpretations of the word? Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all Americans are entitled to “liberty.” But 24 years later, he founded the Southern Plantation Party (aka the Democratic Party), which sat on the rationale African slaves were neither full-fledged humans nor Americans. Thus the Jeffersonians declared “black” people were ineligible for the freedom the Declaration gave to “white” men. The Constitution that followed the Declaration authorized owning “We the People” if the People’s skin was “black.” From the beginning of American government, “freedom,” like the flag, has been a Rorschach test, a matter of personal opinion.
As America approached the flag’s 200th birthday, Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Remember that disagreement with France when French Fries were renamed “Freedom Fries”? Don’t teenagers think they have the freedom to do whatever the heck they want to? Did America’s founders believe the flag represents the freedom for two men to marry each other?
As the 20th century lurched to an end, the Supreme Court announced the most nonsensical definition of freedom. The freedom the flag represents was interpreted as the freedom to burn the American symbol of freedom. Do you see the problem with that elastic word “freedom”? Which of the many “freedoms” does the flag represent?
Longer to approve than founding documents
The American flag design took two to four times longer to approve than the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution together. The behind-closed-doors process was so fussy and contentious that the first Revolution flag – the “Grand Union” – was scrapped a year and a half after it was presented. Even the smallest details of the flag were debated vigorously. Each symbol meant something specific.
The Grand Union, raised in January 1776 at the start of the Revolution, confused everyone. The soldiers that assembled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for Washington’s arrival did not like it. Why was the flag of the enemy (the Union Jack) on the flag of rebellion? Washington noted in a letter that the British troops who arrived in Boston were so confused they thought it was a flag of surrender.
Washington had his own starry commander’s flag designed and posted at his headquarters. The Continental Congress worked another year and a half to revise the banner to appropriately represent the Revolution. The redesign was simple – it merely replaced the British Union Jack in the upper left-hand corner with a night star circle. That star circle is where the name “a new constellation” came from. The Flag Resolution of June 14, 1777, stated: “Resolved: that the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.”
The red and white stripes faded into the background when the “new constellation” appeared. The central symbol of the new banner was now the star circle. This night-star-circle-and-stripes became the emblem of the greatest revolution of the modern world.
The idea that this miraculous new country would grow into a nation greater than the greatest of the ancient empires, Rome, was one that began in England nearly three centuries ago. One of England’s greatest minds wrote a poem (“On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America”) predicting the English colonies would become History’s Great Nation a half century before the American Revolution. Anglican Bishop George Berkeley’s prophetic poem was instrumental in inspiring both the American Revolution and the “new constellation” star circle on the American flag.
Berkeley’s poem was so enormously significant that a line from it – “Westward the star of empire makes its way” – became the subtitle of the first great American history series by the “father of American history,” George Bancroft. More than that, Berkeley’s poetic forecast had so much historical, philosophical and theological weight that it was an invisible driver of American history for the last 300 years. It was, for example, the theological foundation for the “Monroe Doctrine,” “Manifest Destiny” and America’s entry into both world wars, Korea and Vietnam, not to mention America’s role in opening the Mideast 200 years ago.
Clearly, Berkeley’s forecast set the stage for America and its providential destiny and mission. It was history, not historians that elected Berkeley an authentic prophet. Britain’s American colonies did become – not just a nation – but History’s Great Nation, just as Berkeley predicted three centuries ago, long before the American Revolution.
Many Americans will scoff and say this is all part of the irrelevant past. The European Union doesn’t feel that way. The EU loves America’s “new constellation” so much that it borrowed it for its flag. If you put the “new constellation” canton of the first Stars and Stripes presented on June 14, 1777, next to today’s EU flag, the two look virtually identical.
One of the best known Bible verses of the 19th century was Hosea’s “a nation perishes for-lack of knowledge.” Could the archaeological resurrection of the cosmic meaning of America embedded in the name of the original Stars and Stripes, “a new constellation,” prevent History’s Great Nation from crashing?
Can you pass the flag test?
1) Please explain what each of the five symbols on the flag – stars, stripes, red, white and blue – symbolize.
2) How do each of the symbols relate to one another?
3) And finally, why – when you do the “flag math,” i.e., when you add these five symbols up – do they signify “a new constellation,” the original name given to the Stars and Stripes?
4) How do these five symbols proclaim “FREEDOM”?
Paul Dinger is the founding editor of the Boston Review of the arts. He worked for 20 years in the Boston media as a reporter, editor and columnist and was associate editor of a music industry trade magazine. Dinger is the descendant of an American Revolution soldier, and members of both sides of his family supported the Revolution and heard the Declaration of Independence read in Philadelphia.
